


Easy

by FrostbitePanda



Category: Mad Max Series (Movies)
Genre: F/M, Fluff, One-Shot, Podfic Welcome, Post-Movie(s)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-03
Updated: 2015-07-03
Packaged: 2018-04-07 12:41:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,824
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4263621
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FrostbitePanda/pseuds/FrostbitePanda
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>His big shoulders bump the rusted metal of the bed frame as he settles on the floor, arm draped over his knee. He's been gone only four days, and there is a clicking, whirring energy within him that stills her.</p><p>(Max confesses.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Easy

His big shoulders bump the rusted metal of the bed frame as he settles on the floor, arm draped over his knee. He's been gone only four days, and there is a clicking, whirring energy within him that stills her.

The moon is painting him in white. All she can see from her vantage is the sharp geometry of his profile, the glint of his spiky hair, the arches of his eyelashes. The silence broadens, taking a form and shape all its own.

A long, shuffling breath pushes through his nose. He is blinking as if against a sudden light, bowing his head in the face of it. Words emerge from the humming low in his chest. "'M in love," He halts suddenly, as if the last word was a piece of shrapnel suddenly biting into his flesh. He waits for the sting and burn to melt away. "With you." He isn't looking at her, only swaying his head in a shallow nodding motion that she knows so well. Reassuring himself as much as her.

He's looking at her now, eyes dark and deep.

Her breath is catching in her lungs, clamoring for purchase. She knew this man very well, because they were very much the same. They were both of grit and dust, writ from desert storm. All sun-marked and scar-clad. He was a burned and kicked thing, ghosts howling for him from every shadow.

But she is sure that she would not have allowed the same admission from herself.

Perhaps he knew that. Perhaps that is why he is sitting on the floor of her room letting the words bloom into life within her four-chambered heart, curling within artery and vessel.

She realizes then, almost tragically, that she hadn't known how to quite identify what had happened to them over the past several hundred days. She loved the Sisters, the last Vuvalini, in a fierce, mother wolf sort of way. She had never felt love for a man past the rough and ramshackle camaraderie she briefly shared with her War Boys. Love was never an option open to her. Love, happiness... those were of the Old World. Before. Not now. Never again.

+++

It's 196 days before she sees him again.

They've fought off Bullet Farmer buzzards and Gas Town scavengers. They've reopened trade routes, established quotas, rations, territories. Dag has planted and sown with much of the Wretched, building terraces and tarps with War Pups. Cheedo has exorcised the Organic's "shop", whitewashing the black soot and ochre stone to reflect light, rather than absorb it. Capable helps Wretched erect buildings, with walls and doors and windows. Toast stands over the blacktumbs in the machine bays, learning as much as leading. Furiosa watches all, proud beyond reckoning, but extracting the venom from such an old wound is slow burning and treacherous.

He arrives in the night, a shout going up among the watchers at their posts. Toast is mustering a party to intercept the lone figure to the east, but Furiosa stays her.

He is a nervous, flighty thing. As restless and shifty as when he had staggered into their lives with a limp War Boy on his shoulders. A certain amount of calm had grown over him, she realizes, during his time with them. Now his hands were ready for fight, his eyes blinking through a fog of trickery. Unflaggingly weary. Exhausted.

Despite this, he brings gifts. A book for Toast, though half of it is burned. A sharp hoe for Dag, though the handle is long since lost. A telescope for Capable, though the lens is broken. A bolt of cloth for Cheedo, though it is stained with motor oil. He brings nothing for her. Only himself, useful but broken like his gifts. They had never left his mind, no matter how far he had trekked into the waste.

He has more practicalities, of course, heaped on the back of his pilfered bike. Guzzoline, a rag-tag collection of guns, a mosaic of bullets.

He sleeps fitfully that night, on the floor of her room. "You'll rest better in here." She knows this and he agrees, spreading out the bedroll given to him.

He is gone with the sun the next day, but always he returns.

He helps Toast with her shooting, Capable with the winching of stones, Dag with the building of terraces. He even ventures nervously into the Healing Ward, as it is now known, with Cheedo.

The lights in his eyes flicker, his muscles wind down, his hands slacken if only slightly. Her slumber is not so fractured with his moans and thrashes in the night.

He follows her, too, hardly ever speaking. Her shadow. His only words are questions, direct and practical. Learning her job, how this beehive of life in the midst of a desert works. She is simply glad of his help. His company. His capability.

One night before he leaves again (she knows, always), she stays his hands as he shakes out his bed roll. He stiffens under her touch, question in his face. Silently, she turns around, presenting him her back, a heavy, telling gesture in the vulnerability it exposes. He is still, considering her unasked question with a steadying breath. She knows to be patient with him.

His hands come up to her left shoulder, progress delayed as he seals a palm over the brand on her neck, blotting it out. His fingers are broad but nimble as he works the buckles and straps free. As her arm falls, he catches it carefully, placing it on her bench in the corner littered with parts and parchment.

When she turns around, his mouth is on hers.

And over the next 300 days, spattered with absences both long and brief, his mouth is on hers often. On her clavicle and the crease of her knee, the pads of her fingers and the space between her thighs. They take night watches together, guns glinting and deadly in the starlight, shoulders brushing like leaves. He brings her bean cakes while she tunes his leg brace by lamplight.

One day after his last return, she brings him to have a bath and he struggles with the shears on his hair. She takes them from his frustrated grasp and snips away the old growth as she kneels within the bracket of his legs. She feels his palm tuck into the angle of her knee and he breathes, strained and labored. His last haircut is still flashing hot and fresh in his brain, but he's okay if she's there. A grounding wire, spiriting his electric ghosts safely away from him. When she is done, the ridiculous cow lick at the back sticks up with renewed vigor and she smiles, a single bark of laughter escaping her like the trapped thing it had been.

He feels it too, as he looked up at her, corners of his mouth up-ticked. The scarcity of laughter in the world. The seeming plentitude of it in this new one, built together.

He leaves the next morning, and for the first time, she misses him savagely.

+++

He turns away, eyes roving and jumpy. "Thought you should know," he says into the night and still she cannot move. "You know, in case you didn't feel..." He coughs, hums some more. "Want to keep things... fair." He seems to have fallen on the last word reluctantly and he twitches his shoulders. "Don't want to fuck it up." His voice rises ever so slightly with his last words.

He's said this to a woman before. Came from a world where a man and woman would turn to each other and say ' _you're it for me and you were all there ever was anyway.'_ He needs to tell her, so that she knows, for sure. So she can wise up. He shows no mercy and pulls no punches with her, going for the gut. A kill shot.

He doesn't meet her eyes and she is really just having trouble slowing her heart down so she can talk. She thinks she might have some kind of fever as his eyes fall upon her at last.

Finally she speaks, appreciating the time he has given her to consider him and his words and everything they meant. As if he had just presented her with a plan to drive straight through three war parties and ride right back to where they came from. "I thought you said hope was a mistake." The words are creaky, forced through a small space.

He nods, looking a little pained at the memory. "Not with you." He says without hesitation and this time his eyes don't leave hers.

She knows now that he's been thinking about this for days and days. Turning it in his brain like a worn totem as he sat among the rusty stone and shadows of the Waste, fleeing from the lights in his eyes and the siren calls in his ears. A man weighing carefully, survival of the utmost priority. Choosing to take a bike loaded with supplies into a land of python dunes and skeleton ruins, or to speed across dusty salt pans and back to her. He had always come back to her. She was always worth the risk.

He clears his throat and she notices that he is slipping very quickly into a taught anxiety. But he will not ask anything of her, ever. He seems to make a move to stand, to get to his feet, to leave her for the last time.

"Max," she breathes, heart in her throat. His shoulders tense ever so, his name scalding him for an instant. She absolutely does not know what to say to him. Doesn't know how to form the words in her mouth that would say “ _you're it for me and you were all there ever was anyway.”_ Doesn't know how to articulate all of the things he had been able to make her feel. Those parts of herself so carefully removed, plucked free from her clean and precise. He had transfused them back into her, slowly, slowly.

She reaches a hand down to him and he immediately snares her fingers in his own, brushing rough lips over boney knuckles. She needn't be worried. In a world where everything was struggled and scraped away, they were always easy together. Easy. Like handing her a loaded rifle just moments after trying to kill each other. Like clasping his hand with her own, redemption in his eyes.

He rests her hand on his shoulder, setting his grounding wire, and looks back out to the Waste. His eyes spark with starlight rather than illusion. He heaves a great breath, settling back and taking the first watch.

 

+++

 

 _Easy, easy_  
My man and me  
We could rest and remain here easily  
We are tested and pained  
By what's beyond our bed  
We are blessed and sustained  
By what is not said

 _\- Easy_ Joanna Newsom

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you so much to the lovely bethagain for stunt reading for me!


End file.
